International law is a major casualty of the last few years of reporting from the Middle East. The abuse, inversion, misrepresentation and weaponization of international legal terms and concepts has been a cornerstone of the storm of anti-Zionist propaganda engulfing much of the media coverage from the region.
This increasing trend undermines real international law and threatens the United States and the wider Free World, as these false representations of international law are increasingly deployed against Western interests more broadly.
One of the most prominent spreaders of this misinformation has been the Mayor of New York. From alleging that synagogues were promoting activities “in violation of international law,” to threatening to arrest the Prime Minister of Israel, to arguing that the US is “subsidizing a genocide,” Zohran Mamdani is a frequent offender and a key driver of this worrying phenomenon.
The impact on New York’s Jewish community has been palpable. But the broader effect of these increasingly widespread misconceptions of international law should not be underestimated. These buzzwords are intended to stymie debate, project a false narrative and ultimately target the West. It is high time that Mamdani was called out on his falsehoods.
The Mayor has repeatedly described Israel as an “occupying” power, engaged in an “unlawful occupation” and supported claims that Israeli settlements are “illegal under international law.” All of these claims misapply fundamental principles of international law to the territory of the State of Israel, the borders of which arise from the universally applied customary rule of Uti Possidetis Juris, “as you possess under the law.”
This rule has applied to the formation of the borders of emerging states in order to maintain stability and certainty, in a decolonization context, across South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It is a default rule which provides that the existing administrative lines on the map are maintained and become the borders of the new states at the moment that they emerge.
As the only state to emerge out of the territory of the British Mandate for Palestine, after 75% of the Mandate was granted by the British to the Arabs to form what became the Kingdom of Jordan, and in the absence of any contrary agreement on borders, the applicable rules of international law are clear: in 1948 Israel took on the pre-existing administrative lines of the Mandate on that date as its international borders. The customary rule’s application to Israel is epitomical. There has yet to be any sensibly argued justification for making an exception with respect to Israel.
There has been no subsequent agreement to change those borders. So, in 1967, when Israel recovered Gaza and Judea & Samaria/the West Bank from Egyptian and Jordanian occupation respectively, it could not have been an occupier. No sovereign can occupy its own sovereign territory; Israel is no exception.
The falsehoods propagated by the Mayor and others as to the status of the territory, with false buzzwords of “occupation” and “illegality”, have become pervasive. But that does not make them true. Equally offensive is the deployment of this false analysis in relation to the Israeli communities that exist in Judea & Samaria, some having re-established themselves after being ethnically cleansed from that territory by Jordan in 1948-49.
The suggestion that Israeli settlements are “illegal” is not founded in real international law, but is an apparently palatable way of saying “Jews shouldn’t live in certain areas just because they are Jews”. It further underpins the grotesque calls for the modern-day ethnic cleansing of Jews from these areas.
The Mayor’s disgraceful use of the term “apartheid” in relation to Israel ignores the real apartheid in the region: there are no Jews in Palestinian controlled territory. The territories that Israel relinquished in exchange for assurances of peace, in Areas A and B of the West Bank, subject to international agreement and guarantees, and in Gaza unilaterally under unrelenting international pressure, are now Jew-Free. That is the true apartheid.
As with all the abuses of legal terms and false accusations against Israel, we see the phenomenon of projection, where Israeli Jews are accused of the very crimes that have been committed against them. A case in point is the false allegation of genocide, the “crime of crimes.” Another falsehood frequently deployed by the Mayor. The pernicious nature of this blood libel is evident from the Jewish experience of genocide: the Holocaust, which gave rise to the term, and the experience of victims of October 7 th , targeted for rape, torture, and slaughter, simply because they were Jews. The intention with which Palestinian terrorists pursued Jews in order to subject them to this barbarism is the very definition of genocide.
The false projection of this term and inversion of the allegation is no accident. It is calculated in order to inflict yet further harm on the Jewish People. Further to that, the Mayor’s invocation of this false claim renders the term “genocide” meaningless and dramatically degrades the credibility of the international legal framework and undermines the values it was designed to uphold.
Then there are the Mayor’s threats against the political leadership of a key ally of the US. Mamdani’s vow to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu in New York is certainly dangerous rhetoric, but it is also legally illiterate. Quite apart from this baseless threat being contrary to US federal law, it threatens foundational pillars of customary international law designed to uphold state sovereignty and facilitate international relations.
The Mayor’s own abuse of international law builds upon the abuses already on display at the International Criminal Court (the ICC) itself.
In pursuing its anti-Israel agenda and issuing arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister and its former Defense Minister, the Court has acted contrary to its own jurisdiction, its own rules, and on the basis of demonstrably false allegations.
The canard of deliberate starvation is easily refuted by the publicly available information on the COGAT website, which documented throughout the war in Gaza the volume of aid which was facilitated into the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army. The pursuit of charges by the ICC despite the clear evidence to the contrary is demonstrative of the political agenda now pursued by the Court. The United States has been the sole nation to hold the ICC to account, despite not even being a member of the institution.
Mamdani’s position is hardly surprising, given his hardcore anti-Israel activism and hostility to the New York Jewish community. But his false invocation of international law should be challenged. His attempts to mask his hostility to Israel and the Jews by falsely deploying international legal concepts and phraseology should be called out.
Ultimately, the Mayor is simply peddling modern blood libels against the Jewish state through misuse of these legal terms that inverts their meaning. The impact on Jews is obvious. The impact on international law may be less obvious, but is no less dangerous.
What starts with the Jews rarely ends with the Jews. Anyone who prizes the freedoms of the United States—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—and enjoys the privileges of life in the Free World, should recognize the urgent need to challenge the weaponization of international law. Time is not on our side.
Natasha Hausdorff is a London-based international lawyer and the founder and President
of The Center for International Rule of Law.